Fairgrounds will be site of Friday night fights

The Ventura County Fairgrounds is home to gun shows and chicken shows, car races and pig races, the county fair and a flea market.

Now mixed martial arts is on the list, too.

MMA fighting is coming to the fairgrounds for the first time on Friday night, hoping to draw as many as 2,000 spectators, some willing to pay $175 for ringside seats at the intense and fast-growing sport.

“It is really going mainstream,” said Rene Carranco, president of National Fight Alliance, which is putting on the event dubbed Resurrection. “Right now the demand is there and more and more people are drawn to it.”

Carranco has put on smaller shows with about 1,000 seats at the Hyatt Westlake Plaza, which always sold out. He thought it was time to try a larger venue to sample the county’s tastes for the sport that is a mixture of many different fighting styles, including wrestling, kickboxing, grappling, boxing and whatever other style the fighter wants to use.

Two fighters battle it out inside a cage, kicking, hitting and wrestling in an often bloody brawl that ends when the winner puts his opponent into submission and the referee calls the fight.

As the popularity of the sport has mushroomed, it has become more legitimate with more rules that purist fighters can appreciate, Carranco said. California began legally sanctioning the sport in 2006.

“They see the art in it, the dedication and the training they go through,” he said of the fighters.

Still, spectators often come for the carnage. And Nick Willert is hoping to be on the winning side of the beatings.

“We are like modern-day gladiators,” said Willert, a 32-year-old trainer and bouncer from Ventura, who is fighting the last of eight fights on Friday. “When you get in there and the door locks, there is nothing like it in the world.”

Though he admits his face looks like “hamburger meat” most of the time because of the fights, he loves it.

“It’s a test of myself and to see if I can knuckle up and get in there and see if I’m man enough to do it,” he said. “In every other sport, if you say you got your (butt) beat, it’s a figure of speech, but in this case it really happens.”

Brian Espinoza, owner of Oxnard’s West Coast Jiu Jitsu, said more people are taking lessons these days because its much more like street fighting.

“We’ve got kids interested in it and older people who are interested for self-defense,” he said. “Everyone wants to do it.”